I Hit a Milestone Today

Today, I completed the final action in shutting down a non-performing company, I deleted my email account.

It takes some time to shut down a company that is over 25 years old. There’s the letter of dissolution to the Secretary of State, prepare and close the books for the final tax return, letter to the IRS, shutting down the web site, shut down of domains and other web services, and closing all bank accounts. This all took about five months.

If it’s true you learn from your mistakes, then I should get an MBA for this one. I joined the company in 2018. I first met the original owner and founder of WhirlyBird Solutions, LLC at a SCORE CEO Round table meeting. He was there with his admin assistant seeking help to scale up from a “Mom & Pop” level. After hearing that I was there looking for investment opportunities, they approached me with a proposition. I accepted a full partnership in exchange for some cash and help with scaling up. They really did have the best product on the market, but needed to figure out how to increase sales.

I may go into the details of this adventure in a future post, but for now I’ll just state the reason we failed. We had the best performing product on the market by far. We had a return customer rate of more than 20%, which is spectacular for a product that can last for years. We had sales accounts at West Marine, TrueValue Hardware, Animal Damage Control in Canada, Bird Control Australia, Crown Castle (cell towers), GME Supply (cell towers), Qualtek Wireless, and T-Mobile. We had built a company that was posed to expand. But, we operated at a loss the entire time I was involved. I had made one of the most common mistakes made by failed startups.

The WhirlyBird Repeller is a bird deterrent device specifically designed to trigger fear in problem birds. The WBR mimicked a predator bird with specific motion, sight, and sound. It effectively kept birds off your docked boat, cell tower, or garden. Our customers loved it. So, what’s the problem?

The bird control market is VERY large with a great many well established companies selling products and services. These companies have well established names in the market and they spend a lot on advertising. While we had the best product, the majority of buyers didn’t see us. We never stayed on the first page of search results, when the competition saw us creeping up, they turned up their ad dollars and pushed us back down. The brick and mortar stores sold a few, but since they were on the shelf with the plastic owl, people still bought the owl. They had seen the owls on other people’s docks, so they must work, right? I have a photo of a sea gull sitting on an owl and pooping.

We never became visible above our competitors!

Overcoming this problem would take a lot more capitol than we wanted to invest. This is why you see a lot of new products in TV ads. While TV ads are the most expensive advertising by far, they are the best way to make your product visible over the competition.

A smart person learns from there mistakes. A wise person learns from other’s mistakes!